Cine Machine Gun

23/07/2009

After the first Transformers movie – although feeling CGI filled and fulfilled – I practiced the apparel act of wisdom and roguery to download a really good copy of this one. Riskless beat careless big time, this time!

I was already aware of director Michael Bay's tendency of making mindless popcorn props with huge explosions, scantily-clad women, and awful cheesy dialogue. What’s so bad after all in cashing in a rather great action resume including Pearl Harbor, Armageddon and most of all the Rock? But experience has taught us that when we lay back for “what’s so bad after all", here comes the worse to end all in a digital hurricane of the most ridiculous campy, poorly-written and poorly-directed piece of crap to come out this year. Where the special effects mark a cinematic achievement and blow your senses sky high, every other single aspect and little detail of this movie is a handful of shame slapping you scene after scene.The writing is so unbelievable and unbelievably stupid; you almost have to see it to believe it. A one-day human endeavour no more than four months old – it mentions Obama and the swine flu (!!!) – hastily keeping the production’s pacing. We are not talking about comic, unrealistic or just badly written and executed. We are talking about immense falsehood to the extreme unluckiness of the offended. It's truly amazing that near the “climax” the film manages to shove aside the one interesting dilemma in favour of more stupid exposition: The evil robot demands that the humans turn over Shia Labeouf, and the world responds by trying to catch Shia. Nobody has any luck until the oompah-loompah in Egypt stops his car and some detective, sitting for absolutely no reason in the corner of a shady room under an old fan, notices him. Right from the very beginning, improbabilities swarming the viewer’s brain, risen right from the murkiest tomb of stupidity and irrelevance. Reading this review so far, you‘ve just spent a lot more time considering the plot problems than anyone in the movie. For some reason the time-filler soldiers and Shia Labeouf himself never even consider the possibility of following the robot's decree, and for some reason the rest of the world and the time-filler slimy guy instantly go along with it.The bottom-of-the-barrel clichés and outrageous stereotypes grind you in every line like a milestone. Reading over the screenplay, you would think it was some terrible Transformers fan faction written by a retarded, choke-full of puberty issues goblinoid from Arkanso hills. The dialogue is drop-dead HORRIBLE. This would be a great movie if it was targeted to ten year olds at best, but the overt sexual references and language suggest an older demographic. Maybe it's because Bay is trying to please a wide range of people, and maybe that's why we have jokes made about Transformer Testicles (!!!) and there's a scene where a miniature transformer (with a Jersey accent much less) tries to hump Megan Fox's leg. The cheap laughs seem like an extraordinary nightmare that has no end, becoming cheaper and cheaper as the movie rolls, terminating to absolute mental zero. I honestly would not have been surprised to see a transformer fart in this film, or maybe a scene where a transformer gets high or fucking a space apple pie. Extreme hilariousness acts properly as self-defeating purpose. But don't worry, because there are plenty of scenes – like – of Sam's mother accidentally getting high at college and proceeding to follow the overacting formula of physical humour. Then there are Skids and Mudflap - two Decepticons who can't read, speak in "jive," act like gangster-wannabes, and fight a lot. One of them even has a gold tooth (I am not stoned guys, neither I’m making this up!). And this is the “idea” of the whole film as a crime record against intelligence and originality, already popping up in the prequel: an alien self deployed robo-race that actually doesn’t have any alien or mechanic disposition at all. They all imitate the worse, most blatant and kitsch stereotypes of the multicultural humanity, through the eyes of the below average billybob teenager. The robot characters just suck. They're boring and talk in clichéd voices that pretty much tell you everything you need to know about them (the snivelling, weak bad guy; the menacing bad guy; the solemn good guy; the comic relief twins, etc). Their faces look awful, and they're all completely devoid of personalities and thus impossible to empathize; cheer for or against. They're just CGI blobs, feeling more like fucked up caricatures of humans and animals, than metal at all. Pathetic excuses of sci-fi, assaulting pathetic viewers, who desperately long for a juicy Megan Fox ass burger – a wishful thought that never really comes to pass satisfyingly in this sequel. Every time she's on camera she looks like a makeup crew just touched her up. She has no interesting dialog, no quirks or traits worth mentioning, and does nothing but pose. She may be stunningly gorgeous but interestingly this film leaves you too stunned by stupidity to care enough. Well boys, I’ll be the first to embrace Jennifer’s Body, but regarding Transformers 2, the last sucker may close the door firmly behind him.This disaster is also insanely long, at a running time of 2.5 hours. This probably could have been avoided if there wasn't so much slow motion footage of people running, and running, and running and leaping yet to ground and continue the race against all reasonable action odds. The problem isn't with the quality of the visual effects, strictly-speaking. The gigantic robots and elaborate explosions are all convincing, but the camera never pauses long enough to give us a good chance to take a look or reflect on the characters. The entirety of this movie consists of boring humans we don't care about running from explosions caused by boring robots we don't care about. I could politely state that the visual effects overwhelm the story, but to say so would imply that the film has an existing story to begin with. Yes, I know that the evil robots want to blow up the sun yadda yadda yadda but it's inarguably a paper-thin premise. I would say that the visual effects overwhelm the characters, but then I run into the same problem. The actors themselves act happily hopeless in such a thunderous mess. Clowns with a 200.000.000 dollar crown. Yes, Shia Labeouf does his best, but he's given nothing to do aside from running around and fulfilling the action hero role in the most shamelessly generic romance in recent memory. The human soldiers receive so little to do that I wonder what they're even doing in the movie at all. Their weapons and efforts are hilariously useless, and the movie has to go to the trouble of inserting the aforementioned slimy guy just to give the commander an antagonist to humiliate. The action scenes, while sharpened by Bay’s trademark ever-moving eye, are lost into the sand and scrap chaos. Someone though that “confusing” means “complex” and “diffused” means “detailed”. The robot mumbo-jumbo-commercial-gorillas are so “un-metallic” dexterous and over-articulated that you can't tell what is happening since it's so fast and blurry, you can't figure out for sure.

This year’s Transformers are not “more than it meets the eye”. They bit some eye candy but in the long run are less than the last robo-freak’s childish micro-minimum demands. A flash bang, degrading cinematic experience that utterly transforms you into something bitter.

20/07/2009

“Unholy Ug-Lee-ness”My first acquaintance with the Double Dragon feature film was during my vacation, in an open summer theatre, in 1994. I remember that when I walked out of that theatre, it took me some time to come to my senses, to think what I had just had seen, and then I reconsidered throughly all my ill fated experiences in cinema up to that point. Then in a realization of utter disappointment but also amazement, I told to myself, “Damn. This is the worst movie I’ve ever seen!”Back then I was only thirteen, and since then I have witnessed many horrors on the silver screen. Now, I would have had a pretty endless and pointless struggle answering to myself about just which is the worst movie I’ve ever seen, and if Double Dragon hasn’t moved one bit down the fail-scale all over these years. After trying to watch it one more agonizing time, I came into conclusion that Double Dragon isn’t the worst film I’ve ever seen, but it is surely the most stupid film and certainly the most horrid and unworthy video game adaption.Double Dragon was a great, addictive, cult status video game that shaped the fighting video games genre and personally cost me a lot of time and coin to walk right through its end, hitting buttons like hell. It was the first video game I came to see its credits by my own right, and – damn – it felt good for a kid! So, I’m double biased. But that doesn’t change anything. Although video game based movies have a totally deserving infamous rumor encircling them, this movie sets a total new abysmal record. Super Mario preceding this movie was a moronic gross, but still more decent that this one. And what can I say about Bam Bam Van Dam’s Street Fighter and Lambert’s Mortal Combat? The first had smoking hot Kyle and cheesy Julia and the second had at least pretty good fight choreographies and soundtrack. Both landmarks of silliness, sloppiness, kitsch and dreadful execution – both look like masterpieces to Double Dragon.Nothing can prepare the viewer for the purely emetic experience that the film proper represents. The only faithful features of the video game adaption are the title, some names and some… villain innuendoes. The first problem lies in the screen writing. What made the video games so compelling was that they made as little effort as possible to differentiate its setting from the reality of the player. The story, such as it was, was secondary to people beating each other senseless. In the feature film, the writers attempt in the most ridiculous fashion to give the story of Double Dragon a background, a motivation, or a reality. All these are getting drowned right from the first scenes in totally punk-pulp shallowness and silliness. They manage to get all three in the trash can, as everything in this film comes out the same way: incredibly ugly (or “ug-lee” as stated one of the worst, recurring lines of the film) and inconceivably stupid. Making matters worse is some incredibly awful costume design. I do not know who designed Alyssa Milano's attire for this flick, but I am just betting they spent much of the time when they first saw what they had made laughing their ass off at poor Alyssa. How can anyone go further than Charmed after such an appearance? Whoever designed the makeup effects for the Abobo character should have been arrested for crimes against the 7th Art. I do not know exactly what they were trying to achieve with all the lumpage on his body, but whatever that was, they failed. Perhaps his “best” scene is when Milano is force-feeding him spinach in a torturing (mostly for the viewer) full of farts and burps scene. By the way, heed this warning: don’t even dare to think that the words “satire” or “purposely” can have anything to do with this movie – it is blown way out of proportion, hope and expectation.The direction is just a cinematic abortion of the worst kind. Loose-ended fighting scenes make everyone look like fighting potato sacks, shots erupt in a chaotic walkthrough, and total chaos embedded in puke jokes and petty dialogue make you feel pity even for the wires and cameras that got involved in this thing.Casting was an even more disastrous element that totally destroyed fans’ brains and actors’ career. Alyssa Milano is a teen-street-clown, Kristina Wagner is a boring 80s blonde chick right out from a rock video clip, Scott Wolf is a perky-karate-kid-Tom-Cruise who never cried wolf again after this film, Marc Dacascos doesn’t even bother do all those great choreo that usually does in every film besides trying to act, and Robert Patrick is just an unlucky lame. What a fucking shame of uneasiness we‘ve got here. Dacascos just after the Crow and Patrick after Terminator 2 could have easily fired up their way to permanent stardom and success, at a point that both their careers still had a chance. But what seemed an obvious choice after the Crow and T2 to them and their agents? Double Dragon. Double the idiocy, misfortune and ill-fast-decision and you‘ve got two sparkly cine-figures, ridiculously self-destroyed in the same movie to blame. Even Julia Nickson-Soul that miraculously managed to pull her part through decently… do you even remember her?? Bad & Sad. Anyway, the word “terrible” can not instil or describe the double terror of the natural retard-ness of a wanna be unintentional comedy and a freaking fucked-up flick. You must be wicked hardcore if you can seriously sit through this. I was back in those days, but not anymore.

05/07/2009

I am really glad that I threw another one and a half hour of my life in the shit-hole, because without this movie I truly would have forgotten of how great naturally untalented examples like Christian Slater, give contradictious meaning to the whole Hollywood display.I haven’t played the video game, but I really hope that this movie is very loosely based on it. If I had, maybe I would have sacrificed more of my time in this article risking permanent brain damage – a terrible loss indeed! Probable license defilement present though – as usual for VG adaptations.Every thriller and mystery movie cliché is stuffed and stiffed here in the most inexperienced, discontinued, retarded fashion: childhood trauma, a mad scientist, a HOT scientific chick with an attitude (Tara Reid, please keep on sucking, but NOT in such a movie!), life–beaten hero with amnesia, tricks & tracks & artifacts, military heat, old & new gizmos and weapons of peculiar uses, ancient evils that lurk in the dark (when they show their face you know they should have been kept in the dark), CGI enough to suck, sudden moves, black-op macho-bullshit, unearthed arcana, hosts, psy-zombies and possessors all in one flick, pyramid origins (anything from Mumm-Ra and Gi-Joe to Transformers seem to have spawned from an Egyptian or South American lost civilization these days, just for the supposed coolness of it) paranormal poo, superstitions backed up by one-liner nonsense, quirky action, cheap sentimentalisms and video game cut scenes dressed in video clipping soundtrack.Nice title though – but not even slightly close to make a cult legend out of this one.The plot doesn’t have any holes or gaps at all. It has gorges Grand Canyon style. Improbable set-ups, explanations from the outer space, captive monsters which you don’t even know how they come to be in captivity, a love scene out of the blue and out of order, open ended chaos and total mess in every aspect.The direction is on top of the worst, looking like a remarkably awful patchwork of B-series episodes, and when I say B, I REALLY mean BAD!Of course the performances are to be forgotten even before you notice them, if you even get to notice them among the zero chemistry between the protagonists and the provocative shallowness of the characters in general.Better alone in the dark than in the company of the non-talented-lot. Call me a sick person, but after this one, I deeply missed Silent Hill, Blade Trinity and even Resident Evil 2.